The Wire and philosophy

Having wrecked many, many people's heads by lavishly praising The Wire I recently decided to actually try and write down the reasons why it appealed to me so much. A problem immediately presented itself though: I didn't know why I liked it. To be sure, its uniquely satisfying blend of long character arcs, labyrinthine complexity, brilliant acting, and outstanding writing all contributed to its appeal. Beyond this, I struggled to account for my proselytising zeal (I reckon I've now watched it six times). Its obvious pre-occupations with corruption being the root of all evil and men having to do what men have to do both struck me as being, well, kind of lame. I wondered if the show's mechanics of plot, character and style (dialogue, cinematography, etc.) were really the main reasons why I loved it so much, while simultaneously recognising that excellence in these areas are seen frequently enough in TV nowadays.

It was at this time that a strange irony struck me: despite the narrative conservatism of The Wire (unlike The Sopranos it has no surrealist reveries, unlike Mad Men it has no explanatory childhood flashbacks, and unlike Breaking Bad it has no madcap Top Gear-esque adventures), it seems to me to be the most philosophically literate of all these brilliantly made programmes. Without ever mentioning any thinker by name or explicitly expounding an argument it explores many issues that are familiar to any philosophy student: problems raised by thinkers like Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Freud.

One of the most obvious thematic concerns of The Wire is its pre-occupation with surveillance. The title alone, in its allusion to wire tapping, makes this clear. Beyond this, nearly every episode features a scene in which someone is either being recorded or filmed for a purpose prejudicial to their own interests. Elsewhere, senior cops compile incriminating files on their subordinates to better manipulate them while one section of the FBI secretly keeps track of another section's investigation in order to undermine it. Reminiscent of the Danish court's obsession with monitoring Hamlet, something is clearly rotten in the state of Maryland.

Despite the prevalence of surveillance-based imagery the connection between the brutal and widespread violence on display and these monitoring techniques is never really made clear until season 4 when we encounter poor Namond Bryce, a teenager terrified by the environment in which he's forced to live. And this is the point at which The Wire and Freud intersect with the show's writers making it clear that a consequence of surveillance is that it ensures that those monitored are denied the chance to change as individuals. Where the motivation to monitor is due to atavistic impulses and drives in Freud  The Wire shows that this impulse to observe is tied to the far more prosaic need of ensuring that those watched don't change, lest they should no longer fulfil their assigned role in the system in which they've been reared to serve. Indeed, just to highlight their debt of gratitude to Freud, the show's writers show Namond being terrified of his “dragon lady” mother (who, in fairness to the lad, resembles Livia Soprano in her desire to seemingly want her son killed) before being able to flourish by identifying with the father figure of Bunny Colvin. The Freudian loop is even nicely closed off by the revelation that Namond's actual father is instrumental in creating the chaos on the streets that so terrifies him: his mother may be the proximate cause of his deep distress but his father is the ultimate cause. Namond's familial predicament is the same as society's predicament, whose members are constantly monitored by a brutally degrading system that ensures they can't exit.

Talk of degrading systems brings us nicely to Marx. With characters frequently echoing the line “business, just business” (usually just before perpetrating some betrayal or horrific act of violence) it's clear that the creators of The Wire are very unhappy about capitalism indeed. Where it actually succeeds in providing insight into the nature of capitalism though is in its relentless depiction of money's awesome, protean force. In The Wire (as in The Communist Manifesto) money talks, incessantly and seductively. Thus, we have the despairing cycle of one generation following their antecedents into more or less identical roles (peaceful Dookie becomes Bubbles with his need to get money but not hurt anyone, Michael becomes Omar taxing the supra normal profits of the drug dealers, Carver becomes the responsible yet compromised middle manager like Daniels, while Sydnor follows McNulty's lead by giving valuable gossip to a judge) as the system determines which economic roles they'll fulfil. Similarly, we have the transition of authority from one drug running operation to another where, despite the violence involved in the handover of power, its clear that the only thing that is certain is that one group will ultimately end up victorious: markets, like drug addicts, abhor vacuums in supply.

Cyclical views of history and a keen appreciation for the potency of money aside, one element of The Wire that would surely have won the admiration of Marx is the former's treatment of “public opinion”. Here, the basic message is that “news” addresses only the concerns of the more prosperous elements of society while those in the socio-economic doldrums are rarely discussed. This is seen most clearly in those scenes where Tommy Carcetti is informed that his priorities as mayor are to get notional increases in certain key statistics and also ensure that he manges to organise construction of a landmark building. Discussions of the actual issues plaguing the city never really seem to take place and when these problems actually do break onto the news agenda there's only ever a battle to influence perception of how these issues are portrayed rather than actually addressed. The effect of all this is that participants within the brutalising system are completely disaffected from the media, correctly recognising that the media's interest really lies elsewhere regardless of whatever conceits it may have about its own crusading role in righting social wrongs. The author of The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte would undoubtedly have understood this point.

Max Weber too. His analysis of rationalisation and disenchantment with the bureaucratic world-view is closely linked to Marx's treatment of alienation. The Wire honours this intellectual affinity by highlighting how the obsession with reducing costs (“more, with less”) is now a major a feature in institutions that in the past weren't seen as needing to be profitable: the police and school boards juke the stats while the local paper self destructively seeks to replace valuable older reporters with younger, inexperienced newcomers. Similarly, the police headquarters is indistinguishable from any contemporary corporate office block. The result of this drive to homogenise all social institutions by denying their unique functions is that fantastical and illusory pre-occupations replace the real, more lethal concerns that ought to be addressed in public discourse (and which would be far more obvious if these institutions were honourably run). Public opinion thus shows itself to be outraged when drugs are tacitly legalised and also when an imaginary serial killer stalks the land, doing work more accurately attributable to combatants in a gang war. The fact that both of these phenomena were accomplished facts (drugs were freely available before the decriminalisation zones and murder was already a terrifyingly widespread instrument of conflict resolution before the advent of the fictional serial killer) didn't matter: public opinion had seen something it didn't like and was determined to console itself with futile displays of outrage that did nothing to address the underlying problems.

These two plot threads bring us nicely to Nietzsche and his notion of transvaluation: that the professed morality of a given society can be so corrupt that only its opposite values can possibly redeem it. In this light Bunny Colvin's decriminalisation of drugs (an object of fetishistic and irrational hatred rather than a catch-all term for substances that include alcohol) and McNulty's invention of a serial killer make more sense when its born in mind that the professed morality is what's being targeted. While the basic intent of having a police force is benign the ways in which this motivation manifests itself in Baltimore are deeply damaging and wasteful, being more closely related to the conceits of the more prosperous classes than to any realistic assessment of the needs of society as a whole. This, the gulf in understanding between those fully engaged with the murderous trauma of inner city life and those in the comfortable suburbs, leads to an alienation and despair so deep that it can only be manifested by audacious stunts that attempt to spotlight the grotesque ugliness of society's self-image. The conceits of society's more prosperous citizens were as morally repugnant for Nietzsche as they are for The Wire's creators.

So, Baltimore seems to be a society where an abyss of communication (and, consequently, despair) exists between people who live and work only miles away from each other. Having drawn heavily on German philosophers to indict the place it thus seems strangely appropriate that the only vaguely positive philosophical insight (as opposed to bitter insights concerning the ultimate cruelty of the universe) offered is a quote attributed to “Fonzie” Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.” To people trapped in a nearly inescapable cycle of grinding degradation this may be about the only consolation that can be offered: that despite the entirely understandable urge to retreat into defensive individualism this may yet intensify the pain you feel by further isolating and alienating you from others.

In a world that daily becomes more and more obsessed with surveillance, nebulous notions of economic growth, the commodification of personal identity and with placating the wealthy The Wire seems to have an almost Cassandra-like relevance. It may not be perfect (season 2 has its longueurs, the villains in the newsroom are denied the sort of nuanced treatment the drug dealers are afforded, and it strikes me that there's something unsatisfactory about its treatment of women in general) but through its exploration of the above themes it is far superior to the glibly episodic “quality” TV shows it's frequently compared with.

The Wire is brilliantly made, relevant in a way fiction or drama normally doesn't seem able to achieve anymore, and humane. From the outset it's just not that obvious that a cop show could be all these things.